Expertise
Leadership
Product Design
Visual Design
UI/UX Design
Art Direction
Branding
Copywriting
Professional Summary
Leadership: Manage a team of 20 designers within an Agile environment for large scale projects.
Product design: Over 18 years experience designing large and small scale digital products for major media companies Pacific Magazines, Yahoo7 and News Corp, and retail brand Joe Bananas.
Stakeholder management: Extensive experience managing internal and external stakeholder relationships across product, PR/marketing, advertising/sales, technical and executive teams. Excellent communication skills and exceptional ability to work collaboratively.
Creative Direction: Brand development, conceptulisation and art direction for brands across media, tech and retail industries.
UI/UX design: Knowledge of best practices and design principles. Experience in IA, interaction design, user-testing, wireframing, personas and customer journey maps.
Agile: Adopted Agile methodology for multiple large scale projects within a cross-functional team.
Copywriting: Strong skills in copywriting for PR/ Marketing releases, product profiles and web content.
Professional experience
HEAD OF DESIGN - News Corp Australia
Key Responsibilities
Lead a team of 20 designers across the disciplines of product, digital and motion design to facilitate the delivery of consumer and commercial products for business partners.
Drive future design directions with key stakeholders across the business, including Executive Leadership. Fostering collaboration with engineering, product teams, operations, and sales and marketing to maintain an efficient and cohesive delivery process.
Advocate for design in the wider News Corp business through the implementation of regular design newsletters and hosting of quarterly showcases, increasing the profile of the team and individuals, and raising awareness of design initiatives, resulting in a higher engagement with the team and improved collaboration between production and delivery groups.
Develop and lead scalable design strategies, processes, budgets and schedules for key deliverables and projects.
Implemented a tiered talent structure to enable clear professional trajectory for team members, skill sharing and development, and peer-to-peer reviews and mentoring.
Consultation with external vendors and agencies to deliver product development and releases, including CODE Sports and eCommerce products.
2021-PRESENT
2018-2021
SENIOR Product Designer - News Corp Australia
Key Responsibilities
Co-led the development and implementation of the News Corp Design Language System, including the set-up of the framework, defining the cross-functional team workflow, and implementing support systems to improve scalability, production efficiency, and ensure design consistency across the network.
Identified the need for brand guidelines for News Corp digital products and proactively hosted brand workshops with key stakeholders across editorial, product, marketing and sales to define the brands' values, tone of voice and digital content strategy.
Mentored team members to aid in their skill development and foster their professional growth through structured feedback reviews and 1:1 coaching sessions.
Redesigned the news.com.au mobile website, resulting in a 15% increase in user engagement and a 24% increase in unique audience in the first 6 months.
2015-2018
CREATIVE DIRECTOR - JOE BANANAS
Key Responsibilities
Increased online sales, with a growth rate of 32.4%, via management of brand digital presence through content and marketing strategy, copywriting, and design of digital marketing assets.
Developed and executed the creative strategy for the customer experience in both the physical retail spaces and online via the website and social media, resulting in an uplift of 31% for digital user engagement online and 7.6% average engagement on social media.
Defined and implemented brand creative direction with marketing campaign development and production, sales packaging design, and creation of product and branding collateral.
Positioned brand for international market with the organisation of US and European trunk shows, which facilitated the successful opening of a flagship store in New York.
2014-2015
PRODUCT DESIGN TEAM LEAD - YAHOO7
Key Responsibilities
Owned and defined design language for the Yahoo7 content network, improving network scalability and usability. Decreasing site production time from 12 months to 2 months, resulting in significant gains in performance and revenue.
Increased digital user engagement for Pacific Magazine brands by 1837%.
Managed workflow of project team of 4-6 designers and was responsible for their output.
Oversaw the implementation of design language and subsequent delivery of 14 projects.